Welcome to WCSim

WCSim is a very flexible GEANT4 based program for developing and simulating large water Cherenkov detectors.

As of August 2014 WCSim has been moved to GitHub. It can be found at:

https://github.com/WCSim/WCSim

Tutorials and information about the branches and WCSim development model can be found on the wiki:

https://github.com/WCSim/WCSim/wiki

WCSim has very few external dependencies. It relies on only ROOT and Geant4.

There is a mailing list which will send you GitHub push/checkin notifications here:

https://lists.phy.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/wcsim-git

You can follow issues/requests etc by watching the GitHub respository.

Validation Webpage

WCSim uses Travis CI to perform build and physics tests for each pull request and commit. The scripts it runs can be found at https://github.com/WCSim/Validation

The output can be found at: https://wcsim.github.io/Validation/

Documentation

More detailed information about the simulation is available in doc/DetectorDocumentation.pdf

doxygen documentation can be built by running cd $WCSIMDIR/doc && make Additionally, doxygen documentation is available at https://wcsim.github.io/WCSim/inherits.html

Build Instructions

As of the Hyper-Kamiokande hybrid configuration, the following prerequsite software is required

• A -std=c++0x or -std=c++11 compatible compiler. e.g. gcc 4.8.5
• ROOT v5r34p36 or v5r34p38 (all v5r34 probably works). ROOT v6 also works (6.20/04 has been tested) and will be the only supported version going forwards
• GEANT 4.10.03p3 (or later)
  • All of the G4 data files are also required to be installed, include hadron xsec, etc.
• cmake3 (and ROOT & GEANT4 compiled with cmake)
• The environment variable $WCSIMDIR should be defined as your WCSim directory (not the build one).

export WCSIMDIR=`pwd`

Build Instructions using CMake:

CMake is cross-platform software for managing the build process in a compiler-independent way (cmake.org). It is required to build ROOT and GEANT4 also through CMake. Cmake 3.1+ is required. Using cmake, builds and source code need to well separated and make it easier to build many versions of the same software.

A recommended way to set up the directory structure in your own preferred WCSIM_HOME:

• ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim : contains the src dir, typically the cloned or unzipped code from GitHub
• ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim_build : contains directories for each build, eg. for each branch you want to test or for different releases, comparing debugged versions, etc. Each subdirectory like WCSim_dev or WCSim_v1.2 would contain the intermediate files produced during compilation and not the finale ones
• ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim_install : contains directories for each build, eg. for each branch you want to test or for different releases, comparing debugged versions, etc. Each subdirectory like WCSim_dev or WCSim_v1.2 will contain the final executable and libraries, the example macros and library for ROOT.

To compile you need to have CMakeLists.txt in the WCSim source dir.

• mkdir -p ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim_build/mydir ; cd ${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim_build/mydir
• Set up the environment variables

  #WCSim things
  export WCSIMDIR=/${WCSIM_HOME}/WCSim
  export G4WORKDIR=$WCSIMDIR/exe
  #Geant4 things
  export G4INSTALLDIR=/path/to/geant4/install/dir/
  source $G4INSTALLDIR/bin/geant4.sh
  source $G4INSTALLDIR/share/Geant4-10.3.3/geant4make/geant4make.sh

• cmake3 ../../WCSim : this executes the commands in CMakeLists.txt and generates the Makefiles for both the ROOT library as the main executable.
  • For some OS, cmake3 is just cmake
• make clean : if necessary
• make -j3 install : will first compile the libWCSimRoot.so and libWCSimCore.so which you need for using the ROOT Dict from WCSim (e.g. to read the output files) and then compile WCSim.
• source bin/this_wcsim.sh : will setup the environment variables such that you can run WCSim

To recompile:

• Typically just make install will be enough and also redo the cmake phase if something changed.
• Sometimes you need to make clean first.
• When there are problems, try removing CMakeCache.txt, and redo the cmake.

Useful cmake commands:

• make edit_cache : customize the build.
• make rebuild_cache : redo the cmake phase.

WCSim cmake build options

• -DWCSim_Geometry_Overlaps_CHECK=<ON|OFF> If ON, turns on geometry overlap checking (slow, but important when setting new detector geometry options). Default: OFF
• -DWCSim_DEBUG_COMPILE_FLAG=<ON|OFF> If ON, turns on the gcc debug compiler flag -g. Default: OFF

Build with CMake on sukap:

A script allowing to build WCSim with CMake on sukap is available:

cd $WCSIMDIR
./setup/env_sukap.sh
./make.sh

Note that ./make.sh should also work on other systems.

This script will read the current WCSim directory name and create a directory to hold the different cmake builds. For example, in case your current WCSim directory name is 'WCSim', it will create a '../WCSim-build' directory. It will also create a ../WCSim-install directory.

It will then create a directory for your current branch which will have the name of the current branch. For example, in case your current branch name is hybridPMT, you will have:

WCSim/
WCSim-build/
WCSim-build/hybridPMT/
WCSim-install/
WCSim-install/hybridPMT/

Note that by defaul, just make install is run. You can run make clean before make install by running ./make.sh clean

Using WCSim without building using Docker:

Docker allows you to use WCSim without compiling in an OS independant way. The Docker images are hosted on DockerHub and can be used by following the steps below.

1. Install Docker cross platform instructions can be found at https://www.docker.com/
2. Pull the WCSim image from docker hub by using docker pull wcsim/wcsim:tag where tag is the tagged version or use the tag latest to get the current develop branch
3. Run the docker image and create a container docker run --name=WCSim -i -t wcsim/wcsim:tag this will give you a shell in the container's OS with WCSim already built. To save data from inside your docker image mount a local folder in the docker image at runtime and then anything placed in that directory will be available in that folder after exit. To do that run the following docker run -v local_folder_path:docker_mount_path -i -t wcsim/wcsim:tag
4. Once you have run the docker image, you will already be in $WCSIMDIR and WCSim (and prerequisites) will be setup. Therefore, you can just start running WCSim as normal from this directory
5. To exit the docker image exit

(Note: You only need to use the docker run command once to create the container. Once created you changes are saved in that container instance and you can start and stop the container at any time with docker start WCSim and docker stop WCSim);

Extra docker commands:

1. See all images docker images
2. Delete an image docker rmi imageID
3. See all containers docker ps -a
4. Delete a container docker rm ContainerID

Note that this method currently uses make (not cmake) to build

Using WCSim without building using Singularity

Singularity is a similar container tool with different philosphies. The most important being that you can't run as root. This means that it may be installed and available to use on your local cluster.

You should be able to run the docker container with singularity without any problems. Just to note that $WCSIMDIR will be read-only, therefore you should run WCSim elsewhere (if you forget you'll see a nasty seg fault - this is just because of the read-only directory).

Note that this method currently uses make (not cmake) to build

Running WCSim

To test that WCSim is working, try running the test macro WCSim.mac, which runs 10 electrons with 5 MeV of energy in the Super-Kamiokande detector (it should take less than a minute to run).

cd /path/to/wcsim/build/dir/
./WCSim WCSim.mac macros/tuning_parameters.mac

WCSim.mac is well commented. Take a look inside (and also at other .mac files in /macros/) for the various options you can use to run WCSim

Analysing the output of WCSim

There are a few example scripts inside sample-root-scripts/

• sample_readfile.C is a general script that allows you to see (most) event-level variables
• For the hybrid geometry, see AnalyzeWSHierarchy.c
  • Compile it using the Makefile in sample-root-scripts/ (i.e. run make from that folder)
  • Execute it using Analyzer.sh in sample-root-scripts/ (i.e. run ./Analyzer.sh from that folder)

Color Convention for visualization used in WCSimVismanager.cc

• gamma = green
• neutrino = yellow
• electron = blue
• positron = red
• muon = white
• muon+ = silver
• proton = magenta
• neutron = cyan

WCSim development is supported by the United States National Science Foundation.